Menu

JIllian Lauren

Menu

Tag Archives: pre-school

When your kid starts pre-school for the first time, you take pictures. You cry a mommy tear. You hang out to help with the transition. And then, if you’re us, you realize after a couple of days that your kid isn’t like the other kids his age at the pre-school. That his needs are different. And the pre-school realizes it, too. And after two days you get a phone call about the fact that they can’t accommodate those needs.

The next school it takes one day.

The third time your kid starts a new pre-school you don’t take pictures. Instead you break down in tears (not a sweet mommy tear- a full snotty cry) in the director’s office. You hang on the sidelines, trying not to let your anxiety spill over onto your kid…

So we started a new pre-school with T a few days ago. I often don’t go into the challenges we face with T in this blog because I’m not always sure how to frame them. I usually feel like I need some more wisdom to share before I start blogging about things. But in this case, I’m just going to say that I have no idea how best to handle this school situation. Basically, T has aggression issues (he hits and bites) when he feels overwhelmed or threatened, which is often. Also- he doesn’t sit still or share or regulate his emotions. So school is a wee bit of a challenge.

T is attending pre-school with a “therapeutic companion” now. But Scott or T’s auntie or I also stay there. And there’s a therapist who’s sometimes hovering around. And I’m deeply grateful to the school that they’re putting so much time into our family and into T, but I’m biting my nails to the bone about this some nights. I want to do the best thing for him. Maybe this is it. Maybe it isn’t. I’m willing to put the time into the transition, but I’m also open to other possibilities.

I just recently talked with an old friend who’s son has sensory integration issues that manifested in a very different way when he was pre-school age. Instead of being aggressive and off-the-walls like T, her son would retreat into himself and hold his ears, rock and totally shut down. She chose to pull him out of pre-school and didn’t send him until kindergarten. Then she chose a school that was highly focused on ritual and structure and flow. He’s eight now and doing great.

The thing that struck me is that she said she wasn’t going to subject her son to being terrified every day. And even though T has a very different way of showing it, essentially I believe that’s what’s going on. My son is so scared. He loves being around other kids but all the stimulation also frightens him. And faced with the fight or flight response, T chooses to fight. He’s a fighter. It’s probably the reason he’s alive, after all he’s been through. And I love that fire in him, but I want him to feel safe enough that his fighting spirit finds expression in a soccer game and not in a school yard smack-down.

I’m not sure what the best way to do that is, but I’m committed to finding out.

READER'S GUIDE

I Tell Stories

Family Roots December 9, 2014
A woman finds an unexpected new family when she adopts a son, a bad soldier learns to write from personal loss, and a man is working at a nuclear power plant when disaster strikes.http://themoth.org/posts/episodes/1425

Jillian Lauren is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, Some Girls: My Life in a Harem and the novel, Pretty, both published by Plume/Penguin. Some Girls has been translated into seventeen different languages. Her next memoir, Everything You Ever Wanted, is coming out from Plume in 2014.

Jillian has an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Magazine and Salon.com among others and has been anthologized widely, including in The Moth Anthology, True Tales of Lust and Love and Best of Babble Blogs.

She has performed at spoken word and storytelling events across the country, including being a regular on The Moth mainstage, and has been interviewed on such television programs as The View, Good Morning America and Howard Stern.

She is a popular and sometimes controversial blogger at MSNBC, The Huffington Post and Jillianlauren.com, which was named a Top 100 Mom Blog of 2012 by Babble Magazine.

Jillian is married to Weezer bass player Scott Shriner. They live in Los Angeles with their two sons.